Our Daily Bread

Words of encouragement can be “life words,” bringing new motivation to our lives. Mark Twain said that he could live for a whole month on one good compliment!

In his classic spiritual allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan paints a word picture of a man “who looked no way but downward.”

My 6-year-old son Steven and I were sitting beside his bed reading a book one evening when he suddenly whispered in my ear, “I want to know how to be a Christian.”

It was a morally dark night in Babylon. Darker than your workplace, school, or community. King Belshazzar had willfully blasphemed God by desecrating the sacred goblets looted from the temple in Jerusalem. Now Babylon and Belshazzar were about to face God’s judgment.

My son Mark and I were digging out the stump of an old tree in his front yard. The tree had been only 5 inches in diameter, so we didn’t think the task would be difficult.

It was a shocking tragedy. A 15-year-old boy was strangled by the family’s pet. The slender youth had gone to an upstairs bedroom to play with an 11-foot Burmese python. Nobody is sure how it happened, but the supposedly tame snake turned into a killer that took the boy’s life.

The 19th-century hymnwriter Ira D. Sankey was walking with his young son on a cold winter day. As they came to an icy spot, Mr. Sankey said, “My boy, you’d better let me take your hand.”

Some people openly declare that they don’t want to go to heaven. I’ve had people tell me that they would rather be with their drinking buddies in hell than with the church-going crowd in heaven.

Scottish author George MacDonald told this story of a woman who had experienced a great tragedy in her life: “The heartache was so crushing and her sorrow so bitter that the one in distress exclaimed, ‘I wish I’d never been made.’ With spiritual discernment, her friend answered, ‘My dear, you are not fully made yet; you’re only being made, and this is the Maker’s process!’”

New love is exciting! We’ve all seen it in newly married couples. It doesn’t matter if they’re 20 or 70, love makes their faces beautiful and their feet bounce.